The 1981 Canadian film, The Pit, tells the story of a creepy little jerk named Jamie Benjamin (Sammy Snyders).

Now, admittedly, Jamie is only twelve years old and, usually, I make allowances for bad behavior from people who aren’t old or mature enough to know better.  But there’s just something off about Jamie.  He comes across as creepy from the first minute he shows up, with his intense stare and his blonde bowl cut.  He spends a lot of time in the woods, where he has discovered a hole in the ground.  The hole is full of hungry creates that Jamie calls Trogs.  Jamie regularly takes raw meat to the hole and tosses it in.  Unlike all of the kids at school and his own parents, the Trogs are always happy to see Jamie.

It may sound like a bad idea to give meat to a bunch of monsters that you just happened to find in the woods but Teddy thinks it’s a good idea.  Teddy is Jamie’s teddy bear.  Teddy talks.  Teddy has all sorts of ideas for how Jamie can get back at everyone who has ever made fun of him or left him feeling insecure.  Why not just toss them into the pit?  Is Teddy real or is he just in Jamie’s mind?  The film tries go for some ambiguity.  That said, the Trogs are definitely real so it’s not that difficult to go from accepting the idea of carnivorous monsters to buying into a talking teddy bear.

Jamie is entering puberty and his hormones are going crazy.  When his parents leave for a trip, they hire a psychology student named Sandy O’Reilly (Jeannie Elias) to keep an eye on Jamie.  Jamie develops a crush and soon becomes obsessed with Sandy.  Jamie is the type of kid who pretends to drop something just so he can look up Sandy’s skirt.  (Bad Jamie!)  Despite Jamie’s crush on Sandy, he still steals money from her so that he can buy raw meat for the Trogs.  When he can’t get any more meat, he starts tempting real people out to the woods and pushing them in.  When he tells Sandy about the Trogs, she doesn’t believe him.  He takes her to the pit and that’s when things really start to get bad….

The Pit is an odd little film, one that never quite settles on a tone.  In the original script, the Trogs and Teddy’s advice were all meant to be in Jamie’s head and Jamie himself was only meant to be 9 years old.  The horror elements were meant to be products of Jamie’s disturbed imagination and one can still see elements of that in the completed film.  However, director Lew Lehman decided to make Jamie older, to leave no doubt that the Trogs were real, and to add a small amount of humor.  As such, The Pit is a film that veers from being a horror film to being a somewhat depressing coming-of-age film to a somewhat mean-spirited comedy.  Sammy’s behavior, which might have been understandable for a 9 year old, becomes even more creepy now that he’s a twelve year-old who still takes orders from a teddy bear.

It’s a confused film but Sammy Snyders gives one of the best creepy kid performances of all time and there’s something undeniably satisfying about the ending.  As Jamie discovers, he’s not the only kid with a pit and teddy bear can only protect him for so long.